In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now<\/em>, presented just across the border at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, offered a refreshing take on tackling this challenge. The exhibition centred Indigenous worldviews through lens-based work by 130 artists from across Turtle Island (including both Canada and the United States)\u200a\u2014\u200aa major feat of collaboration by curators Jaida Grey Eagle (Oglala Lakota), Jill Ahlberg Yohe, and Casey Riley, along with an Indigenous Curatorial Council that included some of the exhibiting artists. It is particularly fitting that photography was the featured medium, as artist and Indigenous Curatorial Council member Dr. Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora Nation) has explained that \u201clens-based practices defined the twentieth century, and the emergence of Indigenous photographers was key in the current explosion of re-interpretation of pejorative photographic representations.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Dr. Jolene Rickard, \u201cReturning Home: Indigenous Art Creating the Path,\u201d in Becoming Our Future: Global Indigenous Curatorial Practice<\/em>, eds. Dr. Julie Nagam, Carly Lange, and Megan Tamati-Quennell (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2020), 19.<\/span> In other words, photography has played a central role in both limiting and expanding views of identity and culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather than a chronological sequence, three thematic sections, \u201cA World of Relations,<\/em>\u201d\u201cAlways Leaders,\u201d and\u201cAlways Present,\u201dthough porous, allowed for artists\u2019 shared values to be addressed throughout. For instance, in the first section the importance of matrilineage and memory was highlighted in Clan<\/em> (2020) by Faye HeavyShield (Kainai Nation), whose installation of four floating cream-coloured dresses brought to life the full-length portraits of women in her family wearing mirroring garments. In the third section, the installation of layered cut-outs of the faces of her great-great-grandmother, herself, and her daughter by Wendy Red Star (Aps\u00e1alooke) in Amn\u00eda (Echo) <\/em>(2021) also highlighted lineage. In these artworks, the artists look in both directions to the women surrounding them; this idea of the past and future being held in the present rang throughout the show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Photography and Indigenous representation have long been linked through a fraught history of settlers extracting images for their benefit without proper consent\u200a\u2014\u200aoften in efforts at colonial nation-building. Much of the imagery in In Our Hands<\/em> worked toward undoing this relationship and reclaiming the medium as a form of sovereignty. It was powerful to witness the results of artists using a tool that played an influential role in both the assimilation and the redefinition of Indigeneity. The pieces by Catherine Blackburn (English River First Nation Dene) are an exquisite example. But There\u2019s No Scar? <\/em>(2017) is a creamy stretched deer hide with a large, vivid shimmering patch of coloured beadwork in the centre representing the bruises and pain of residential school life. The intricacies of the beadwork make clear that it took perseverance and time to complete, as does the healing process. Beside it, Blackburn appears seated on the floor wearing the hide on her back in a lightbox portrait made by her cousin Tenille Campbell (English River First Nation Dene\/M\u00e9tis) titled But There\u2019s No Scar II<\/em> (2019). This portrait memorializes the history of the land and the cousins\u2019 ancestors and their artistry and experiences, and it continues a practice of intergenerational and embodied healing\u200a\u2014\u200apartially in private, as Blackburn withholds her gaze from viewers. Like the exhibition title, In Our Hands<\/em>, suggests, this pair of pieces aptly connects the importance of hand-crafted work to the process of honouring identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The encyclopedic museum\u2019s traditional focus on the Western point of view was skipped over as Louis Situwuka Shotridge (Tlingit Nation), one of the earliest image makers highlighted, provided an early-twentieth-century Indigenous perspective that has typically been portrayed by settler artists and ethnographers. Shotridge photographed the people of the American Northwest Coast at the same time as did Edward S. Curtis (who was not in this exhibition), a settler who received much recognition for his romanticized depictions of Indigenous communities along the same coastline. Shotridge\u2019s portrait, A Git-Keen young man, Skeena River. Sept 26, 1918<\/em>, is a nuanced portrayal of a young boy, quietly smiling as he poses outdoors in a blazer, dignified, though situated in the process of assimilation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The artists\u2019 voices provided much of the narration through video interviews, an audio tour, and labels many of which were written by the Curatorial Council or by the artists\u2019 friends, family, or mentors. I was particularly moved by the snapshot of Nettie Odlety (Kiowa) sitting smiling on the floor\u200a\u2014\u200ataken by her friend Lucy Sumpty (Kiowa)\u200a\u2014\u200abecause it is rare, and feels intimate, to get the name and story of a figure in what seems to be a personal vernacular photograph. The wall label was written by Odlety\u2019s great-granddaughter, who, as she shared about Odlety\u2019s life, expressed the importance of preserving Indigenous family histories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was an overwhelming yet thrilling amount of work; over 150 pieces filled nine galleries. Exhibitions organized by a particular element of identity\u200a\u2014\u200ain this case, Indigenous heritage\u200a\u2014\u200aare at risk of being reductive, but here the naming of the larger group in the exhibition title felt assertive. It was bolstered by the mass of artists included and a clear reminder that these artists and their ancestors have been making art and co-opting the camera for ages despite proper recognition from settler-led arts institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The exhibition enacted tenets of decolonization not just by giving space to but, in numerous ways, by prioritizing Indigenous perspectives and practices. To me, these choices speak to the importance of having multiple curatorial contributors (minimizing ego and blind spots), a focus on the value of consensus as noted in the show\u2019s opening wall text, and perhaps the significant benefit of collaborating with an outside council, because the partnership will then include community interests and thought beyond institutional linearity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An independent curator, Frances Dorenbaum is a PhD candidate in the Art History and Visual Culture Department at York University. Her current research focuses on settler-colonial representations of Canadian national identity in twentieth-century news photographs.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/111_CR_Dorenbaum_Faye-HeavyShield_Clan_05.jpg\")
Clan<\/em>, 2020, installation view, 2023.
Photo: Sheila Regan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/111_CR_Dorenbaum_Wendy-Red-Star_Amnia_01.jpg\")
Amn\u00eda (Echo),<\/em> 2021, installation view, 2023.
Photo: Sheila Regan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/111_CR_Dorenbaum_vueexposition_04.jpg\")
Photo: Sheila Regan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/111_CR_Dorenbaum_vueexposition_01.jpg\")
Photo: Sheila Regan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n